An observation - it may be obvious - robot personality and advanced 'artificial intelligence' are not necessarily coupled. It does not take a robot with near human intelligence or brain-like reasoning capacity to become a friendly interacting member of the family - as a pet or helper.

The development of human to robot relationships could advance at very different rate than the science of artificial intelligence. The next invention in robot personalities no longer depends on the next step in technology. It will be driven more by what people want.

I guess we had to reach a certain level of capability before this decoupling could occur.

Anyway, it is nice that you can now pick a personality, sort of like a font, to go in your vacuum cleaner. Will we need to start upgrading our other applances? And, will they all get along?

Will people's household robots start to resemble them? Or the other way around?